1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a software installation system and a method for copy protection; more particularly, to a software installation system and a method capable of preventing illegal distribution of software by using portable information processing terminals such as a mobile phone and an RFID tag to prevent software distributed with being recorded in a recording medium such as an optical disk from being copied.
2. Background of the Related Art
Korea Software Property-right Council announced that a financial damage caused due to illegal software usage has amounted to approximately 30 billion won only in Korea and a total financial damage including a financial damage caused due to illegal usage of software developed overseas has amounted to 29 billion dollar in 2004.
A corporate damage caused due to distribution of illegal software is several times more than a normal sale profit. Although the illegal software is used by businesses as well as individuals, it is difficult to prevent the individuals from using the illegal software rather than the businesses.
Since the individuals illegally distribute on Internet such as P2P (Peer To Peer), Warez and Web Hard without the consent of a copyright company, it is difficult to expose the individuals' illegal software usages and to find out an individual who firstly spread the illegal software. Since an original file name is changed at the time of distributing the software, it is difficult to prevent the distribution of the illegally copied software at first.
Easiness of the copy, which is a characteristic of the software, inversely functions as a potential and fatal disadvantage included in the software. Accordingly, various arts for protecting the software from the illegal software copying have been proposed and widely used methods include a method of authenticating qualifying software in on-line area and a method of inputting a CD-key or a serial number in off-line area.
As described above, one example of an art of authenticating the qualifying software on-line is disclosed in Korean Patent Registration No. 0602107 (registered on Jul. 10, 2006, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MANAGING SOFT COPYRIGHT OF NETWORK ENVIRONMENT”).
The art disclosed in Korean Patent Registration No. 0602107 is constituted of a client PC in which specific software is installed and a license server authenticating the software by receiving user information from the client PC through a network. Korean Patent Registration No. 0602107 discloses that the license server is constituted of a communication module for transmit and receiving data to and from the client PC, a product registration module for registering a product by receiving a product serial number, product registration DB in which the product serial number is stored, a use authentication module for determining whether a user is an authorized user or not and use authentication DB in which an authorized user authentication log is stored.
That is, the art disclosed in Korean Patent Registration No. 0602107, a user accesses the license server through the network to obtain a license of using the software of the client PC and the license server determines whether the use of the software is legal or not by stepwise comparisons such as the product serial number of the software, collision occurred or not, execution occurred or not, the comparison of an IP (Information Provider) address and the inquiry of a legal user, and transmits the approval or disapproval to the client PC so as to protect the copyright of the software by preventing the illegal use of the software in a copyright management system and a method thereof.
One example of an art of authenticating the software by the use of a CD-Key is disclosed in Korean Patent Publication No. 2005-0052980 (published on Jun. 7, 2005, an electronic creation method of a serial number containing an identifier of software, contents or electronic information, an issuing method of a coupon printed with the serial number, an authentication method using the serial number and a computer-readable recording medium in which a program for performing these methods are recorded are disclosed in this patent gazette).
The art disclosed in Korean Patent Publication No. 2005-0052980 relates to a method of performing the certification of the authenticity by creating the serial number to certify the authenticity of the software, and more particularly, discloses that the authenticity certifying method includes the steps of receiving a created final serial number, decoding the inputted serial number, extracting variables and a solution of a specific function expression from the decoded serial number, checking whether the extracted variables and the solution of the specific function expression satisfy a specific function expression previously defined between a serial number creating server and an authentication server or not, and confirming whether the extracted variables contain an identifier of the software, contents or the electronic information or not.
In the art disclosed in Korean Patent Publication No. 2005-0052980, there are disclosed a method of electronically creating a serial number including identifiers of software, contents, or electronic information capable of saving an unnecessary fee and firming up the protection of a privacy and a business secret of a content provider, a method of issuing a coupon printed with the serial number, an authentication method by the serial number, and a computer-readable recording medium in which a program for performing the methods is recorded since the authentication is smoothly performed although a issuer server and a content provider server are not communicated with each other on-line, the art is not influenced by a non-settlement situation caused by a network error occurring in the related art or a serial number leakage situation caused by hacking and the intervening of an interim account settlement server is not required.